President Trump declared a national emergency to free up funding for his border wall between the U.S and Mexico. But declaring a national emergency isn’t new -- in fact, the use of emergency powers is older than the country itself.
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Trump, who has long described the situation on the Southwest border as a "crisis" and an "invasion," appeared to suggest his administration had all the time it needed to build the hundreds of miles of border barrier he has demanded for months.

"I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this," Trump told reporters gathered in the White House Rose Garden on Friday, shortly before he signed a proclamation declaring the emergency. "But I'd rather do it much faster."

George Conway, an attorney and frequent Trump critic who is married to longtime Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, summed up the reaction in a post on Twitter: "This quote should be the first sentence of the first paragraph of every [lawsuit] filed."

This quote should be the first sentence of the first paragraph of every complaint filed this afternoon. https://t.co/ClHQhpTaEe

A bevy of groups lining up to challenge Trump's national emergency are likely to rely on the quote to suggest the "emergency" is a fiction. Federal courts closely studied Trump's own words and tweets to pick apart the administration's argument that the travel ban the president signed in early 2017 wasn't targeted at mostly Muslim countries.But in a decision upholding the ban, the Supreme Court said it had to consider not only Trump's statements but also "the authority of the presidency itself" in reviewing his actions.

But experts said the president's words, which were emblazoned on cable network chyrons most of Friday, are unlikely to bring down Trump's emergency declaration. The National Emergencies Act gives a president wide authority to define what an emergency is – setting no hard rules over how urgent a problem must be or how potentially damaging.

Congress wrote the law, intentionally, to give presidents flexibility. The more challenging legal question for the White House is what powers Trump intends to invoke once the national emergency is declared.

"Because the president's words are so at odds with the ordinary meaning of 'emergency,' any brief challenging the emergency would be negligent not to quote him," said Peter M. Shane, a constitutional and administrative law professor at Ohio State University. "Whether a court would use those words to void the declaration is another matter."

President Donald Trump declared a national emergency Feb. 15, 2019, at the White House in an attempt to fund and build his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.(Photo: ERIK S. LESSER, EPA-EFE)

Public Citizen, a Washington-based watchdog group, was among the first to say they intended to sue over Trump's emergency. Allison M. Zieve, the director of the watchdog's litigation group, said the organization will "definitely recite his statement in our papers, and I expect that all the complaints will."

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, also raised Trump's remarks during his own press conference on Friday in which he said he’s coordinating with other attorneys general to prepare a lawsuit.

"President Trump got one thing right this morning about his declaration when he said, 'I didn’t have to do this.' He’s right, he didn’t have to do this," Becerra said. "In fact, he can’t do this because the U.S. Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to direct dollars.”

U.S. government data from the southern border indicates the vast majority of narcotics captured at the border is coming in through ports of entry, not the wide swaths of border in between where additional barriers could be erected. And the number of migrants apprehended for trying to enter the U.S. illegally is significantly less than it was a decade ago.

A counter-rally led by former U.S. Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke, holding his son Henry, joined the March for Truth with hundreds of people along with Border Network for Human Rights, Women's March, to protest against President Trump campaign rally in El Paso, Texas. NICK OZA, for USA TODAY